Commons Artist Project: Brendan Fernandes, "A Call and Response"

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Brendan Fernandes’s dance-based installation in the Commons, entitled A Call and Response, explores the ways society sees and values different kinds of bodies. Using language, architecture, and gesture to understand the nature of being seen, Fernandes encourages dancers–and visitors–to collaborate and generate new forms of physical language that move and attract other bodies in space.

Fernandes (Kenyan, b. 1979) seeks to isolate everyday actions, such as running for the bus or slinging a bag over your shoulder, considering individuals’ movements in social spaces as a kind of choreography. Over the course of the exhibition, the artist poses the question: How do the shapes of our bodies and our physical proximity to others affect our sense of visibility?